Overview

Participating Artists: Nelly Sethna, Ritzen Mozumdar, K. G. Subramanyan, Monika Correa, Prabhakar Barwe, and others.

CONA’s objective is to titillate the environment where pressures of production and consumption have marred our ability to realize that culture can never be a commodity but is rather a quality of the human mind, which influences our communications. Titillation can happen through reordering our production systems, consciously diverging from the trends, where they escape themselves to become something else. As Subramanyan rightly says about societies of today, “…whether in developed or developing countries, societies are too involved with the “trees” of day-to-day problems to be aware of the ‘wood’ of existence. This is overwhelmingly so in the developing countries where these ‘trees’ are of gigantic proportions.”

Riten Majumdar, Nelly Sethna, and a few others did diverse projects in the 1960s in attempts to reconfigure arts and crafts. In the 1980s Riten moved to Santiniketan and sidestepped his Design Consultancy for Art Practice. According to Harji Malik, “He made a series of paintings in dyes on stretched silk. He combined blocks and/or used one in repetition, since for him a single unit can be used to produce an endless variation of designs. Thus devising a whole from parts rather than imagining a whole that is subsequently divided into parts.” The works in the exhibition belong to different periods, representing in ways the shift from existing in one system and the urge to exist in another.

Nelly Sethna, whose practice as a weaver falls into a hybrid space, where although it lies within the 2-dimensional space, it still transcends disciplines and enters the realm of textile sculpture. Monika Correa had experimented with the construction/structure of the loom thereby tinkering with the reeds to attain an illusion. It is interesting to see the transition of two weavers who falter to find a position in the mainstream art economy until recently. Thereby bringing in the conversation of whether value is inherent in the work or in the positioning of the work?

“Escape in a Diorama “, CONA Foundation, Manchester. http://www.conafoundation.net/curatorial-project-details.php?id=26